How do comic book artists do it?

[GlacieR]

Developing the ability to draw 100s of different poses, emotions, perspectives, landscapes, objects, etc all within a 30 day time frame? I can barely draw one panel containing those elements from my imagination, let alone 100s. Is it that they do a whole lot of life drawing?

[MiniGoth]

Practice. Honing the muscle memory so that they can recreate these objects quickly and accurately.

[Tim Murphy]

Developing the ability to draw 100s of different poses, emotions, perspectives, landscapes, objects, etc all within a 30 day time frame? I can barely draw one panel containing those elements from my imagination, let alone 100s. Is it that they do a whole lot of life drawing?

I'm sure the 20 years or so of practice help them out a tad.

[JFierce]

Takes practice, like stated above. Comics force you to do all of those things, then when you do them through hundreds upon hundreds of frames you are likely to get better at it.


Also don't assume every artist does it all from imagination, they use references.

[Falchion]

Personally, lots of practice and an equal amount of legal stimulants. Not having a deadline helps.

[Conniekat8]

they eat a lot of wheaties and spinach!

[vineris]

Developing the ability to draw 100s of different poses, emotions, perspectives, landscapes, objects, etc all within a 30 day time frame? I can barely draw one panel containing those elements from my imagination, let alone 100s. Is it that they do a whole lot of life drawing?

Practice, reference and a lot of observation. You might construct a panel rough from your imagination but then you go and set up the perspective and get the reference and do it as right as you can... fast. Being able to work from reference quickly is a big plus.

After a while of constructing things from your head and finishing/correcting from reference you find that there are things you can now do from memory and you can speed your process up. But stuff doesn't get into your head by magic, you have to put it there with observation and nail it in place with practice.

[TinyBird]

Like Vineris said, comic artists do also use references.
Here's a walkthrough of Sean Gordon Murphy's page, and it starts like this:

Here's the rest of it: http://seangordonmurphy.deviantart.c...thru-278822691
After thumbnailing pages it's not a huge job to go and shoot your own refs.

[Saraiva]

Drawing is not the biggest obstacle in comics. Anyone can figure out how to draw. What you should really look for in a comic book is the storytelling, achieving good story telling is so much harder than drawing muscled super heroes and crazy perspectives.

[sanya]

I second Alternative-- I've been working in comics for two years now and have been lucky enough to observe how the big wigs do it: surprisingly, it's not usually the drawing that trips you up so much as the story telling-- trying to keep in mind flow, dialogue, creating an element of surprise, keeping things loose and dynamic and of course keeping the viewer excited about what they're looking at-- well, after all that problem solving, sitting down to draw is a bit of a treat.

[Nezumi Works]

Comic book artists do it in four colours.

[JFierce]

Drawing is not the biggest obstacle in comics. Anyone can figure out how to draw. What you should really look for in a comic book is the storytelling, achieving good story telling is so much harder than drawing muscled super heroes and crazy perspectives.

The irony is that is so true. It's basically writing a book (for the good ones at least) then spending hours and hours just to get a small portion out.


When I practice I get so caught up in the drawings that I often forget the overall story. Especially since you can't rush it, people try to cut out as much drawing as they can so they skip integral transitions often.





Though I will say there's the other side of the spectrum. It takes balance because if you've ever read any crappy webtoons many spend little to no time on the actual art and only on getting their story out, so the art is utter crap lacking any foundation or basics but the story is ok.

It's a big balancing act.

[OmenSpirits]

I've been killing myself trying to get just 3 PANELS RIGHT! by the script given (think I finally got the third one down...after 2 weeks?!). I won't even go into the first panel shot...damn!

It's not even a story, but a sequence with specific needs asked for in the assignment.

Believe me, working from someone elses script then my own for practice is a WHOLE different game.

[GlacieR]

Storytelling indeed seems pretty difficult too; even just one panel from a writer's script can be drawn in so many different ways. I especially find it quite impressive when they draw characters from angles that would be difficult if not impossible to have photographic reference for. Attention to small or background details is great as well, such as a particular cars and people on a street depicted in one panel, and then in the next panel from another angle you see some of the same people and cars. Truly remarkable to see artists able to do it in just a few weeks.

[JeffX99]

They also typically work in teams...writer, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer. One person isn't doing it ALL in 30 days.

[GlacieR]

I know that, I am saying just to pencil all of that is amazing.

[The Fez]

This thread is the consequence of spending too much time on Deviant Art. I can feel it.

[GlacieR]

I don't spend any time on deviantart. I don't see the correlation...

[The Fez]

Lies, I say.

Lies.

I kid, obviously.

The correlation, at least for me, is that you can't throw a rock in DeviantART without hitting the work of ridiculously talented comic book artists. Or poorly illustrated Naruto fan-art. But that's another story.

[JFierce]

9.5 times out of 10 it's poorly illustrated fan art. At least when it comes to the comic section I've seen.



Jeff pointed out something I forgot. Yes that's something I forget myself when messing around with comics it is multiple people. Even for Japanese manga's which are meant to produced quickly have a couple people working with the artist to fill in and ink the panels.